Daniel Wissa

History of the Start button

With the latest release of the Windows Vista CTP build this week. I was doing some recap with some of the changes made in the history of windows and one of the things that I didnt pay much attention to lately is the Windows ‘start’ button. Most of you will probably know that the start button was a big talk within HCI for it’s inconsistency with user actions – clicking a button called start to shut down – end – a computer … etc. With a bit of search I found the following linkwith all the windows buttons from Windows 95 to Vista build 5259 (2 builds back I think) but the button in this build is still the same. So by the looks of it, in the last 3 builds of vista, including the one released this week 5308 the word ‘start’ is *finally *no longer going to be present. I think this will make HCI guys happy now 🙂

For a recap on the start button in the past 10 years I’ve included the images I found in the link above.